Projecting Amazonia: developmentalism and ecology in Brazilian experimental cinema of the 1970s

With the post-war national-developmentalist policies and, above all, after the 1964 military coup, came the grandiose projects to occupy and colonize Amazonia. The newsreels produced by the Agencia Nacional presented the government's plans to develop and "integrate the region into the nation", preaching large-scale deforestation and promoting the erasure of indigenous histories. This article analyzes three Brazilian films of the period that focused on the Amazon, including Glauber Rocha's documentary short Amazonas, Amazonas (1965), the "documentary-fiction" by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna Iracema, uma transa amazonica (1974) and the medium-length documentary Jari (1979), by Bodanzky and Wolf Gauer. While Glauber's film contributed to reinforce the image of the Amazon as an empty and underdeveloped place, based on a teleological discourse, Bodanzky's experimental films from the 1970s contested the developmentalist consensus and created other ways of thinking about the region, projecting the Amazon not only in Brazil, but on a global scale.